With You Always
by Tropical Storm Bill
Summary: This is set immediately following Dr. Yewll's skinning in the Season 3 premier.
1. Chapter 1

Meh Yewll lay inert, face down on the lab table. Despite her intent to remain awake through the night she had lost consciousness. Throughout the night, the uhaku concentrate she had applied to herself was neutralizing the human toxins that had entered her blood stream through the wound they had carved in her back a few hours ago. Through her unconsciousness, the terrible fire on her skin reached around her abdomen as a stabbing ache through her core. In her troubled sleep one hand still lay atop the cold-beam gun beside her.

With an echoing click, the light above her snapped on. Alarmed by both the fact that she had lost consciousness, and by the presence beside her, she sprang from the table, stumbling backward with a yelp, and crashing into a rack of metal trays, while blindly aiming the gun into the light.

"Peace, Meh, you are safe."

She knew the voice well. Her eyes adjusted and focused as Lev leaned into the light and approached slowly, with outstretched hand.

Meh lowered the gun to the floor and fought to pace her panicked breath. "What is this?" she gasped as the injury seared anew.

"We don't have time." Lev knelt beside the crouching doctor. "Let me see what they did." She gently pulled Meh forward into her lap, and uncovered a violent purple gash the size of her hand. The drying blood had already locked in chemicals that were hazardous to the Indogene system. The flesh surrounding the wound was hot, indicating little time to west before infection spread.

"Lay down, Meh" Lev coaxed, lowering Meh the rest of the way onto the floor. She rifled through drawers and cabinets until she had found a scalpel and a bottle of urtica compound.

Meh strained and clenched her jaw as Lev swathed the wound with the compound. Lev sat down quickly and removed one of her own boots, exposing her bare calf, and applied the compound to her own skin.

"What are you doing?" Meh breathed through gritted teeth.

"Shh." Lev held a thick roll of new gauze to Meh's mouth. "Bite on this as hard as you can."

Then Lev swiftly re-opened the infected wound, removing the scab. Meh screamed into the gauze. Not hesitating, Lev cleansed the flowing wound again. Then just as deftly, she applied the scalpel to her own calf, and choking back a cry, removed a hand-sized piece of her skin, as tears flooded her eyes and nose. She quickly transferred the skin to Meh's wound, and it contorted, melded, and closed the gash. When it had healed closed, Lev finally release and anguished gasp.

Meh struggled to sit up. "Lev!" she exhaled, pulling Lev into her arms.

"I will be ok. I _am_ ok."

"Stay with me, love!" Meh scrambled for clean gauze. "Are you _really_ here?" She hurriedly sanitized and wrapped Lev's leg.

"In a way."

"We have to get away from these people," Meh continued in a panic. "I don't know what else they'll do to us, now that they know what our flesh is worth."

"I don't know what they'll do either," Lev replied in a strained whisper. "But you don't have the strength right now to run, or to survive alone."

Meh listened as she fastened the bandage. "I wouldn't be alone."

"You need to recover, and prepare quietly to leave, and start again somewhere else." Lev stared up into Meh's eyes.

"But I want to be where you are." Meh gently rested her hand on the side of Lev's face.

Lev silently held her gaze.

"Is there a place on this planet where you are?" Meh's voice trembled through rising tears.

"Yes, I am-" she slid her hand under Meh's clothing, and rested it on the healed wound "- here with you always."

Morning sun peeked in the door as Irisa slipped into the room. "Doc," she whispered through the curtains.

Meh startled awake and slid clumsily off the lab table, testing her mobility. "What?" she asked, "What do they want me to donate next?" He angry voice was tired and weak.

"No, doctor. I just wanted to see if you were ok. I stayed with you most of the night."

"Such a martyr. Well, I'm going to be ok. I can take care of myself." She left Irisa there and retreated to her personal quarters.

Locking herself in the bathroom, Meh leaned against the basin and noticed that the fire in her skin, and the vice grip around her torso had disappeared. Her knees and elbows remained sore and bruised from being through to the ground by Amanda and Nolan the previous night. She turned her face to the mirror to see a swollen bruise below her left eye.

The dream flooded back to her- a train of images past her eyes- Lev sitting beside her on the floor as she burned with fever. Lev carving flesh from her own body to cover Meh's torn flesh. Lev laying in her arms gazing up at her.

Meh unfastened and removed her jacket. Looking over her shoulder in the mirror, she observed that the injury from last night was now whole skin, a shade darker than her own, as Lev's complexion had been.


	2. Chapter 2

Broadax Medical Base lay northwest of the ruins of Philadelphia, in a valley shaped by terraforming. It was primarily an Indogene base, centered around the Biodene Project. Other research on native specimens were also carried out in the early days of the base's establishment.

The north and east sides of the base consisted of residential buildings. At the center of the base was the Central Command building, where the infrastructure for waste renewal, energy production, and utility dispersion were located. The Indogenes had long mastered the complete conversion of waste into energy. Adaptations were made for conducting the conversion in earth's gravitational fold.

On the west of Central Command was the Biomed Lab, which included storage of live specimens, mainly human. North of Central Command was he medical center where Votans from all over the region received specialized medical care. Most of the base's residents were medical staff and family. As small number studied terrestrial agriculture, and there was a farm along the southern edge, where research was conducted, and food was produced.

North of the Med Center was the central market, where vendors from surrounding regions conducted business. West of the market and the lab was an entertainment and commercial district, including cafes, watering holes, and a few brothels staffed by humans and Irathients. Few Indogenes found the need for personal entertainment. The district mainly catered to other Votan races, and was profitable for the Indogene community on base.

Typical Indogene living spaces looked like a cross between library and lab. They lived naturally regulated and balanced lives. When their daily lives lacked regularity, they at times experienced psychosomatic symptoms including vertigo, numbness, and hallucinations. Most Indogenes experienced a transition period while adjusting to the shorter solar cycle on earth. The cycle would have lasted 43 hours on Daribo, and would not have included a period of complete darkness, due to Daribo circling two stars.

Not accustomed to this new system's single sun, Votans were at first startled to walk out of their homes and encounter the blackness of "night" as the humans called it. It was an unsettling time adjusting to the shorter sleep cycle, which neither Meh nor Lev had yet accomplished. Lev would not venture far tom the darkness, but Meh had set fear far to the side, an often ventured through the shadows as if was mid-stellus on Daribo. The darkness felt calming to her, and she drank in the billion pin pricks of starlight that were barely visible back home.

So why, on this evening, did the shadows appear to warp at the corners of her vision as she walked from their apartment to the lab? She quickened her pace through the empty central market, and reminded herself that the curvature of her lenses likely distorted her peripheral perception as her sleep cycle had been unsteady. Still, the entrance to the lab seemed so distand, and the distance seemed to stretch past so many shadows and blind spots. She jogged the final stretch and locked the lab door behinder her. She turned on the lightsbefore she cold alow her mind to dwell on various terrifying notions.

Sanitixed and dressed, she entered the temperate biostorage. A grid of square recesses comprised one wall, most of tem occupied by metal cases. The wall distorted and loomed out over her as she approached, causing her to squeeze her eyes closed and regulate her pulse, while reminding herself of her disrupted sleep cycle.

She selected a case and carefully slid it out of the storage wall. The head of a young adult female human rested in a nest of tubes an wires, connected to machinery beneath, which filtered and oxidized blood, and maintained proper moisture and salinity inside the organism.

Meh set the apparatus on a table and began removing bandaging from the eyes. The partially paralyzed face twitched. Meh lifted each eyelid and dropped a solution onto each eye ball. The terrified eyes quickly focused on Meh's masked face.

"Easy there," she told the head in it's own language. Suddenly the body-less head drew a deep breath from absent lungs and an earth-shattering scream roared through the atmosphere, loosening dust from the ceiling. Meh's heart seized in fear.

She shot up in bed, hear pounding and stomach turning from the nightmare that she wished had originated only from her imagination. She sat for half a moment, and then hurried to the nearest rubbish bin. After vomiting the entire contents of her stomach, she washed her face and leaned over the basin, avoiding the mirror. She turned her head toward the window where dusk was rising on the town of Defiance, and on a world where Lev no longer graced her life. There was not a friend within 2000 clicks who she could turn to with her regret, horror, and loneliness.


End file.
